February 15, 2014

THAT’S WHY IT’S SO POPULAR WITH THE INTELLIGENTSIA, WHO THINK THEY SHOULD BE HIGHER UP IN THE CLASS SYSTEM: Downton Abbey Is Downright Un-American. “In a certain sense, Downton Abbey is quite realistic: It portrays the lives of the servants as the upper class imagined them. But I would almost rather they had ignored the servants entirely instead of erecting this Potemkin village of happy servitude. . . . Americans of all people ought to know better. After all, the reason most of us are here is that our ancestors were the sort of people who became servants, rather than employed them — and they didn’t like it one bit.” Ah, but the people who rule us now feel differently.

All but the very poorest on Earth live like kings compared to the richest of 100 years ago. And why is that? Capitalism.

Their are pockets where the benefits of modern life are hard to come by...we know these place as socialist utopias, often they are deceivingly labeled as communist, but is the socialism that keeps people poor and suffering.

the comment is premised on the belief that people don't like to work and find no honor or pleasure in a job well done, whether it's collecting garbage, service, law, or in my case back during the Carter depression using my BA to deliver pizza... It wasn't the job of my dreams, hardly the stuff to bring up at cocktail parties, but I worked hard at it, I enjoyed it, and I was damn glad to have a job. the false premise in Downton Abbey is the extraordinary familiarity between the staff and the family, that's the Potemkin village.

This is nonsense. Downton Abbey is not the least bit un-American. The show if anything is very American.

You have servants who want to improve their lives by acquiring skills and new jobs outside service. Ambition and a desire to improve one's station is in evidenced all over the show.You have a open Marxist transformed into a Capitalist land manager. Hard work is rewarded not taken for granted.

The point of the show is a society in flux that is resisting and at the same time embracing new ideas. Nothing un-American about it.

Y'all must be watching a different program than I do if you see all happy servants...not so many of them appear happy with their circumstances, they move up to something else whenever they can...it just seems to be a destination for only a few - Moseley or Mrs. Pattimore or Mrs. Hughes or Carson but the younger ones Thomas or Jimmy look to find a better world somewhere else, its a stepping stone. Even Daisy wants to move up. For Bates it is a matter of redemption, he's happy to be employed but even he, limp and bad reputation and all seems to have higher aspiratioons

This. And I would add that the underlying meta that the show engages in is profoundly American.

Hugh Bonneville's character cares very deeply for the fairness of things, the treatment of those in service to him, and his responsibility to those who rely on Downton to thrive in order that they may live, and find purpose. Robert and Cora Crawley tried to instill in their children that same sense of obligation. It's part of what made the first season so very amazing - that tension with Isobel Crawley [Matthew's mother] so deeply not understanding the world she was swooping in to try and rescue, and the almost total rebuff she received.

One reason this conservative and so many others like me enjoy the show is because the estate's servant class is-for the most part- pleasant, does a day's work for a day's pay, and isn't consumed with class envy. Even the token homosexual on the show has the decency to keep his private life to himself. How refreshing.

Of course Sean Connery doesn't really have a highbrow Brit accent - he's a Welshman and he speaks with that distinctive, at least among those who can discern between the various regional Brit accents, and rather lowbrow Welsh accent.

Aggggh! Sean Connery is Scottish!!!

Or does being born in Edinburgh & having a "Scotland Forever" tattoo & grandparents who spoke Scottish Gaelic mean "Welsh" these days?

Classism is greatly on the rise in the US, but the closest thing we have to the old Victorian servant/master differentiation is in the public union environment. I was so surprised by it when I encountered it in the USPS. If you work for the USPS as a unionized or management "career employee", you own your well-paid, well-benefitted job and can abandon it, while you go work elsewhere, to a "temporary employee" or "substitute employee" who might do your job for years, even decades, without any benefits or chance of advancement, for a third or less of the union member's pay - and will instantly lose their job when the "career" person decides to come back. The temporary, meanwhile, is "fired" annually for two weeks, then "rehired" - all to get around laws that require permanent employment of those who work a full year in a job. The USPS word "employees" or "jobs" means only those unionized permanent employees. The management and the union members treat temporaries like Victorian servants in that while on the surface things seem equal, the entire culture simply ignores the incongruous difference in status, pay, benefits, etc. There is also a massive reliance on nepotism as a deciding factor in job awards. Mention these realities to any USPS worker or retiree and even the best, kindest, most Christian neighbor, will protest and deny it. The ordinary person simply does not comprehend inequality in the status quo. They didn't then, Northerners still refuse to see the extent of legal apartheid in the North right up until the 1980s, and very few of either party see the inevitable encroachment today within the trend toward "temporary" jobs or imported labor.

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